“I think I just bought this place.”Ĭhernoff’s LGBTQ nightclubs resulted in him being a significant landowner in Denver and Washington D.C.
“I think the next round’s on me,” Chernoff said he told the bar patrons. The owner countered with $32,500 - the sum of his remaining mortgage and current bills - and when Chernoff accepted, handed him the keys and walked out. The owner, upon learning he worked in real estate, offered to sell him the business and the land.Ĭhernoff said he looked around and offered $32,000. In the late 1960s, while scouting locations for a client who wanted to build a Formica kitchen cabinet factory, he stopped at a bar at 2936 Fox St., in what is now called Union Station North but was then referred to as The Bottoms. He became a real estate broker, and worked in that field upon moving back to Colorado in the 1960s. After college, he worked in Los Angeles for five years as an engineer, a job he didn’t enjoy. “I just demand you give me those rights also.”Ĭhernoff was born in Brooklyn in 1942 and moved to Colorado to attend the University of Denver in 1959. “I believe that anybody has a right to do anything they want with whatever they want however they want,” he said.
